Water, ritual, and the spectral urban commons

Abstract

This article theorises the spectral urban commons through Participatory Action Research with Afro-Indigenous and Afrodescendant groups in the Costa Chica of Guerrero, Mexico. It locates the urban in these small coastal municipalities in an uneven regional process through which roads, pipes, administrative concentration, development promises and extractive projects reorganise water, territory and collective life. From this starting point, the article examines water rituals, rain petitions and shared narrative practices across Xochistlahuaca, Ometepec, Cuajinicuilapa and Azoyú to show how commoning persists through interruption, absence and return. The commons appears through ritual labour, memory, translation and refusal, which sustain relations that exceed state legibility while retaining material force. In doing so, the article contributes to debates on the urban commons by showing how commoning in small-city and regional contexts is shaped by infrastructural unevenness, ecological strain and colonial histories of erasure. I offer the spectral urban commons as a sensitising concept for commoning held in interruption, materially organised through ritual labour, distributed custodianship and contested return, yet never fully secured as property or institution.